From the comments section of sciencemag blog
Yes the emails are a big problem. But the real problem is in the other files attched to this 61 MB file, the code in particular. There are frank and explicit discussions of the way that the data was forced into agreement with the models. "Fudge factors" were applied to the data to get rid of data that failed to agree with the AGW theory.
This is all set out in comments in the code placed by one or more of the programmers who seems to be a prime canidate for the position of leaker.
These demonstrate pure and simple fabrication. That is the real reason that these people fought for years to prevent the code and data from being publicly released.
We are on the brink of consigning our futures to global elites who have no problem buying the science they want. The Copenhagen Climate treay openly calls for global government justified on the basis of this kind abused science. If the people behind the political gambit are callous enough to manipulate the academy, aren't we justified in suspecting their motives? They aren't likely to give up should Copenhagen fail.
The travesty is that they were peer-reviewing each other's work! They had control of their own process. It was a closed-loop system comprised of several dozen researchers in an incestuous, self-affirming academic relationship.
With carefully crafted (biased) "statistic" methods it is entirely possible to make data look as damning as you want. It certainly is possible to make it smell like real science while it is not. This is difficult to disprove, especially if no one has access to the raw data to do their own math. All I can hope is that we have learnt from this epic fail. Scientific data and methods MUST be open to peer review, or it may not be trusted at all.
Actually, this ridiculous trend of secrecy has been in this field from the beginning, starting with Michael Mann, whose research (hockey stick curve) has been under fire for decades and whose methods and raw data still haven't been released. In hindsight, that should have tipped us off.
At this point any talks of any kind of legislation on CO2 should be aborted.
The debate was supposedly over even before it began. It reeked of fraud since the beginning, and I for one will not let lying politicians loot the economy on bogus science.
If you have any ounce of decency in you, on whichever side you are, you will demand that any legislation be postponed until an open and public debate actually happens, and the proof be made that if trillions of dollars will be sucked into a phony carbon credit ponzi scheme.
Yesterday I spent 15 minutes reading (the first very small bit of) the Harry_Read_Me.txt file. It's been over 40 years since I wrote FORTRAN and didn't realize FORTRAN compilers still existed.
The sense that one develops without knowing any computer language is that the effort described is a total hack and a poor one at that. Renaming variables to get a clean compile, manipulating data to get results that would seem reasonable, substituting files to satisfy an arcane file-naming convention employed in the program, a litany of frustration to make undocumented and impenetrable code produce any kind of a number that might be deemed acceptable,... If this is a basis for CRU's research and findings, the unit should be shut down, the academics involved should be fired in disgrace, or barring that, at least be required to take undergraduate courses in proper scientific research methodology.
Not only has the Nobel prize for peace been tarnished by naming Gore and the IPCC, but the whole field of climate science is on the verge of being discredited.
There is no question this is a terrible scandal. The CRU cabal have committed serious crimes against science in general and climate science in particular.
The emails show they have punished any effort at independent thought, driven journal editors from their job, stifled the publication of skeptic papers, excluded peer-reviewed papers from consideration in IPCC's AR4 and fudged data to meet certain goals.
What is to be done to make amends for these crimes? Is James Saiers going to be offered his job back as editor of GRL? Is Science Mag willing to be more proactive in the publication of skeptic's papers?
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. It cannot be if the corrections are excluded because of confirmation bias, group think and outside pressure from the CRU cabal.
It seems to me Science Mag should issue gold embossed invitations to Steve McIntyre, Roger Pielke, John Christy, Roy Spencer, Anthony Watts, Craig Loehle and Richard Lindzen to publish any paper they feel was unjustly rejected or needs to be published.
It would also be helpful if Science editors would welcome and publish stories by people who were pressured by the cabal. We need to understand how they did what they did so it will never happen again.
Science is not supposed to be a consensus.
http://blogs.science...imate-hack.html